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At colleges, the AI boom means everyone wants to dabble in computer science

With no background in coding, Faith Maeba, a psychology major, was reluctant when her mother first suggested she enroll in classes on artificial intelligence. But the senior at Virginia Commonwealth University began to see it differently as she looked into graduate psychology programs that explore human behavior in the workplace, which is quickly being upended by machine learning. Maeba, 21, is now pursuing a minor in AI. "It's giving me an edge and standing out," she said. Hiring has cooled for entry-level software developers — work increasingly done by AI agents — and ...

August’s total solar eclipse will sweep over Spain, Iceland and Greenland

For the first time in more than a century, a total solar eclipse is coming to mainland Spain with an even longer encore next summer. Toss in a crescendoing meteor shower and a six-planet parade on the same day, and the heavens will be overflowing with awe. Daytime darkness will descend Aug. 12 across the Iberian Peninsula close to sunset — plus slivers of Greenland and Iceland — as the sun, moon and Earth align perfectly in the sky. Starting near the North Pole before tracking south, totality will last up to two minutes and 18 seconds, an appetizer for an even longer solar ...

A discarded SpaceX rocket is on a high-speed collision course with the moon

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A drifting SpaceX rocket is on a collision course with the moon after launching a pair of lunar landers more than a year ago. The rocket's upper stage will unintentionally slam into the moon on Wednesday, carving out a crater and sending up a plume of dust and rubble that scientists — and skygazers — are eager to observe. Space tracking expert Bill Gray predicts an impact of 5,400 mph (8,700 kph) — seven times the speed of sound — near Einstein Crater on the moon's sunlit western limb. With the action unfolding in the wee hours, the eastern ...

In a German forest, 2 brothers keep the ancient tradition of charcoal burning alive

HASSELFELDE, Germany (AP) — Immo Feldmer carefully tipped smoldering charcoal into a tall mound of earth to kick off the ancient tradition of coal burning. The inside of the mound was tightly stacked with beech wood which smolders for weeks until it's been turned into charcoal — a craft that's been practiced in the Harz mountain region in eastern Germany for hundreds of years. "We are making charcoal in traditional earthen kilns, just as it was done here in the Harz Mountains over 1,000 years ago," Feldmer told The Associated Press in a recent interview as he stood between the ...

For some, so-called ‘Skynet Day’ came too close to sci-fi after a rogue agent hacked into a startup

To be fair, James Cameron did warn us. Long before OpenAI broke out of its test corral and hacked into Hugging Face, before the internet and Sam Altman were even born, Cameron wrote a screenplay about an autonomous artificial intelligence system that triggers a nuclear apocalypse. That system, "Skynet," was solidly science fiction — and, for its day, pure speculation. But four decades after it appeared in "The Terminator," it looks more like a forecast of the "unprecedented cyber incident" in which a rogue artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its ...

Japanese beetle advances through northern Italy’s vineyards and orchards, frustrating farmers

DONNAS, Italy (AP) — The iridescent green beetles native to Japan have become a growing menace in Italy, swarming through orchards and vineyards and leaving behind devastating lattice patterns in leaves that weaken the plants and reduce production. The Popillia japonica, or Japanese beetle, is a familiar pest in the United States, where it arrived more than a century ago. But it is a relative newcomer to the European continent, first detected near Milan's Malpensa airport in 2014. In Italy, it has already swarmed through the northeastern regions of Lombardy, Piedmont and Valle ...